This Day in History

In Alaska, in the Nation and the World

In Alaska

• In 1905, the steamboat White Seal, the first registered vessel to be built on the Tanana River, was launched at Fairbanks.

• In 1935, the flu epidemic in Barrow was reported nearly over after 18 villagers died.

In the nation

• In 1896, 255 people were killed when a tornado struck St. Louis and East St. Louis, Ill.

• In 1933, Walt Disney's Academy Award-winning animated short "The Three Little Pigs" was first released.

• In 1935, the Supreme Court, in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act.

• In 1937, the newly completed Golden Gate Bridge connecting San Francisco and Marin County, Calif., was opened to pedestrian traffic. (Vehicular traffic began crossing the bridge the next day.)

• In 1941, amid rising world tensions, President Roosevelt proclaimed an "unlimited national emergency."

• In 1998, Michael Fortier, the government's star witness in the Oklahoma City bombing case, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after apologizing for not warning anyone about the deadly plot.

• In 2003, Derrick Todd Lee, a suspected serial killer of women in Louisiana, was arrested in Atlanta. A study was released that showed women who took hormones for years ran a higher risk of Alzheimer's or other types of dementia.

• In 2007, Dario Franchitti won a rain-abbreviated Indy 500.

In the world

• In 1936, the Cunard liner RMS Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage to New York.

• In 1941, the British navy sank the German battleship Bismarck off France, with a loss of more than 2,100 lives.

• In 1985, in Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.

• In 1993, five people were killed in a bombing at the Uffizi museum of art in Florence, Italy.

• In 2003, two Iraqis shot and killed two American soldiers in Fallujah, a hotbed of support for Saddam Hussein.